Oo! Let’s Make a Game! Episode 9: Secret Powerz!
Originally published at xenoglyph: the alien writings of designer joshua a.c. newman. Please leave any comments there.
57:39 long & 52.8 MB big
In this episode, Robert Bohl (designer of Misspent Youth) and Joshua A. C. Newman (designer of shock: social science fiction) discuss the abilities of the hunter-fog-cloud thing, talk a bit more about the tech web, then get into brainstorming some of the possible powers that the different characters in the game have.
Notes taken by Joshua and I before and during the episode, with lots of detail on what we came up with.
- Joshua tells a story about badasses and kukris
- Listener feedback from Renato Raimonda, Dave Michalak, and Noah Trammell (02:54 - 10:00)
- Archetype / Dramatic role as a class / race combination
- Vincent Baker’s Apocalypse World
- Ibrahim Dahlstrom-Hakki’s (aka “Slash”) board game, Salah Ad-Din: Rise of a Leader
- We tried to use Google Wave, and there’s a public Wave to look at from our planning session (you need a Wave account)
- The James Herbert novel The Fog, which Joshua conflates with the Stephen King novella, The Mist
- The German boardgame Keep Cool (you may be able to buy this if you speak German), and Vincent Baker’s Mechaton
- The Steven Spielberg sci-fi film Minority Report
- The limbic system (for those of you perplexed by Joshua’s “limbically”)
- The unlinkable but cool Chris Moore game, Psi Run (it was an Ashcan Front game
- Return of singularitarianism
- Return of the tech web!
- Brennan Taylor’s Mortal Coil
- DARPANET
Listener homeworks (2 of them):
1) Give us a name for the cloudkill
2) Give us a name for the little quanta of information the cloudkill gets on you
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The intro music is “Gotta Whizz” by Boris the Sprinkler, from the album Mega Anal. The outgoing music is “Games Without Frontiers” by Peter Gabriel.